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Meeting lifetime goals in midlife – from one entrepreneur who put everything on the line for success

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How innovative new financial products are helping the over-fifties to realise their goals and ambitions

David Prosser

June 22 2018, 00.01am

Nimisha Raja, founder of Nim’s Fruit Crisps, had to sell her house to finance her ambition to run her own company

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It is supposed to be the time of life when people start slowing down and looking forward to their retirement. But as life expectancies increase and people’s health improves, the assumptions made about the over-fifties look ever more out of date.

The reality is that people of this age group are relishing new challenges in the next stage of their lives. That spirit of adventure is found in their personal lives – research suggests that the over-fifties share a passion for travel, being active and dating – and at work, with record numbers changing careers, or even starting their own business. Data from the Centre for Economics and Business Research, a leading think tank, shows that entrepreneurs over the age of 50 now employ more people than start-ups run by their younger counterparts.

One such entrepreneur is Nimisha Raja, who founded Nim’s Fruit Crisps five years ago at the age of 50, giving up a secure job managing a coffee shop to strike out on her own. Having watched parents and children doing battle on a daily basis in her shop over healthy snacking, Raja was convinced that there was a gap in the market for a tasty treat with genuine nutritional value – and she was prepared to put her financial security on the line to prove it.

“It was a leap of faith and I don’t think I would have had the nerve to do it in my twenties – or the life experience,” Raja says. “But while it’s been an incredibly steep learning curve, I was confident that my ability, hard work and determination would ensure I made a success of the business.”

Nevertheless, Raja had to take substantial financial risks to get Nim’s Fruit Crisps off the ground. Initially, she spent close to £20,000 buying equipment to turn her set-up into a small production facility and paying a branding specialist to help her design marketable packaging. When, encouraged by early success, she decided to pursue a more high-volume business strategy, she had to sell her home to finance a much larger-scale manufacturing facility.

Today, that gamble looks to be paying off. Nim’s Fruit Crisps has won a string of awards for innovation, is stocked in 1,500 branches of Tesco (as well as by the Co-op and Ocado) and exports to 15 countries. But Raja accepts that it has been a rollercoaster ride. “Selling my house was a huge deal because it was a beautiful home that I’d worked up to all my life,” she says. “I had to tell my then 14-year-old daughter that we were moving into rented accommodation; she understood my determination, but she was very upset.”

Raja’s experience highlights a problem for her age group. While the attitudes of over-fifties may have shifted, out-of-date stereotypes persist, with financial services companies particularly poor at designing products that reflect the new realities of the second half of people’s lives. The baby boomer generation is sitting on £1.6 trillion of property according, to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, but with their wealth tied up in their homes, people often find it difficult to fund their new ambitions.

The good news is that this is slowly changing, with more providers developing innovative alternatives to traditional equity-release plans, which have long been the only way to unlock value tied up in older people’s property. The Post Office, for example, now offers Retirement Link, enabling older homeowners to borrow against their property, on a capital repayment or interest-only basis. It’s a conventional mortgage, but one that enables people to borrow on the basis of their pension income rather than their earnings, if necessary – and to repay much later than other lenders allow.

It’s a development that can help the older entrepreneur, such as Raja – to set their money free and make their dreams come true, without having to sell much-loved homes.